Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov

By David Vernon

'Nabokov's novels are playgrounds of perfection and dungeons of despair' 

 

Exile, émigré and refugee, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was buffeted by the tides of his times, from the Russian Revolution to the rise of Hitler. But he converted that personal anarchy into a seduct

• Language: English
• Publisher: Endellion Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781739136116

David Vernon

Dr. David Vernon is an academic and writer. He studied at Oxford University and Freie Universität Berlin, where he completed his doctorate on Shakespeare's tragicomedies, and taught English literature for many years in London. He lives in Edinburgh.

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Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov

Copyright © 2022 David Vernon

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

First edition November 2022

Cover and interior layout: miblart.com

ISBN:

978-1-7391361-0-9 (hardcover)

978-1-7391361-1-6 (e-book)

Published by

Endellion Press

Edinburgh

Scotland

To

my wife

E quant’ io l’abbia in grado, mentre io vivo

convien che nella mia lingua si scerna.

Dante: L’Inferno, XV: 86–7

Contents

Introduction: The Conjuror & the Craftsman

Exile: The Life of Vladimir Nabokov

Part One: The Russian Novels

1. Mary: Purgatory & Paradise

2. King, Queen, Knave: Dogs, Dolls, Dachau

3. The Luzhin Defense: Fatal Patterns

4. The Eye: A Hell of Mirrors

5. Glory: Quixotic Voyages

6. Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Is Deceiving

7. Despair: Literature as Ecstasy

8. Invitation to a Beheading: Negating Negation

9. The Gift: Pushkin Avenue to Gogol Street

10. The Enchanter: Pregnant with Death

Part Two: The English Novels

11. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Dead Men & Dead Ends

12. Bend Sinister: The Embassy of Silence

13. Lolita: Comedy, Catharsis & Cosmic Crime

14. Pnin: The Faculty of Pain

15. Pale Fire: The Poet & the King

16. Ada or Ardor: Letters from an Ambidextrous Universe

17. Transparent Things: Proofreading the Past

18. Look at the Harlequins! Invent Reality!

19. The Original of Laura: Smirk in Progress

Beyond the Novels: Memoir, Stories & Other Works

20. Speak, Memory

21. Short Stories

22. Poems, Plays, Eugene Onegin

23. Letters, Chess, Lepidoptery

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Conjuror & the Craftsman

The controlled explosions of Nabokov’s novels enthral, excite, amuse and obsess. They can also frustrate, confuse and shock. His works are playgrounds of perfection and dungeons of despair, workshops of invention and laboratories of cruelty. They can appraise the cosmos with a limitless reach before instantly zooming down through the microscope to scrutinize the most exacting detail (of a character, an object, an event, an emotion).

Nabokov’s novels tease and play games, generously inviting us to join in, before sealing the exits, confiscating the rule book, and opening a trapdoor. They flaunt patterns and splendour, only to invert or corrupt the design for the sake of the sport. They assert ambiguity with a certainty of spirit and seductive security, luring us into the magnificent maze, agitating our values, stirring our conscience, the writing mixing intensity with languid relaxation.

Like the work of his compatriot Stravinsky, the colours and surface ironies of Nabokov’s output enhance rather than hide the profound dark emotions at work, pain and play combining to mesmerizing and often devastating effect. Master of verbal amusement and textual entertainment, Nabokov chooses subject matter that is about as serious as it can get: sexual abuse, genocide, revolution, totalitarianism, exile, poverty, insanity, adultery, torture, murder and suicide. But, in Nabokov, the art of comedy encircles and ensnares that of tragedy, showing – like in Ulysses or The Winter’s Tale – the decisive triumph of the one over the other.

To read Nabokov is to experience sensual pleasure, ambling in the pastures of his prose (but with a rapidly eclipsing sun on our faces). Then there is cerebral joy, as we nod our appreciation of his well-stocked mind and lively library. We need to find energy, too, for the rigour, malice and complexity of his literary activities: the balance and flexibility of his intellectual gymnastics, the dazzle and coordination of his aesthetic acrobatics, and the precision and reach of his ethical exercises. Nabokov’s pyrotechnics in prose ignite his combustible texts, but he is also on hand with bucket and hose lest things get out of control. Firefighter and arsonist, teammate and opponent, player and referee, judge and accused, Nabokov, as a creator should, takes on every role, conjuring up possibility and crafting his art.

The very complication of this virtuosity – its intricacy, its density – has tended to exclude many readers from fully enjoying its wonders. This book seeks to be, then, without oversimplification or trivialization, a sort of starter kit, a stargazer’s manual, a map or travel guide to the landscapes, towns and beauty spots Nabokov lays before us. It is written with the hope that tourists will return, even stay and put down roots, visitors becoming inhabitants. Just as we don’t usually read travel guides from cover to cover but turn to the page we need, each chapter of this book forms a self-contained essay on one of the novels or other aspects of Nabokov’s literary (and non-literary) life. The inclusion of a short biography also allows some features of Nabokov’s extraordinary life to contextualize and, to a degree, illuminate his work.

Our world likes to binge and splurge, but it also likes to consume its art and entertainment in bite-sized portions. This book hopes to marry a little of both aspects. Individual chapters on each novel allow readers to digest Nabokov in a more manageable way, while also engaging with all of what he wrote, gorging on the entirety of his output, from the hors d’oeuvre Mary to the postprandial liqueur Laura.

Each essay does not seek to be comprehensive or all-embracing, though they are wide-ranging and reach far into the ideas and techniques their subjects stimulate. Nabokov’s work invites scrutiny in relation to a vast range of disciplines, isms and ologies – painting, cinema, synaesthesia, ethics, metaphysics, entomology, etymology, cryptology, theology, philology, feminism, communism and totalitarianism, to name only a few. In many cases, excellent full-length studies on these topics already exist. All great art tempts and requires continual (re)interpretation, fresh points of intersection in an almost infinite nexus of possibility, and this book can naturally only begin to sift these immense sands.

In addition, this book wants to maintain the strangeness, the ambiguity, of Nabokov’s works. Complete elucidation undermines the experience of reading literature, endangering its mystery and wonder. Nabokov is a writer of such depth and intricacy that some explanation is often necessary; yet he is also an artist of immense suggestion, evocation and equivocality, and we need to be cautious about offering either assured clarification or bland supervision.

What should be clear is the remarkable consistency of Nabokov’s writing, and this book proclaims the significant brilliance and assurance of each of his works, from the early novels written in émigré Berlin to the last marvels of Montreux. Rarely has a writer been so markedly themselves as soon as they have picked up a pen. Even if they are not all masterpieces (whatever that term really means), every one of Nabokov’s novels deserves a place not just in this book but on your bookshelf and inside your head. It is hoped that the reader, in consulting this guidebook, will make new discoveries after initial visits to the landmarks: the famous novels are places of interest for a reason, but they are far from all there is to see.

For Nabokov has an extraordinary dependability. Even his early works have a distinctive style, a particular and peculiar voice, and an impressive structure, as well as a noticeable attachment to his great themes of consciousness, coincidence, memory, pain, perspective, deception, truth, time and loss. Yet, over the course of his career, we observe no dreary rehashing: the quality and variety remain as the themes are revisited, reworked in inimitable new creations, stealthily enhancing both what has gone before and what is still to come.

Midway through his life, in 1940, Nabokov – the principal writer of the post-Revolution émigré communities – switched Europe for America and Russian for English. Fluent since a small boy in the latter, this was the key to his and his family’s future, allowing him to lecture on literature as well as pursue a second writing career (in addition to developing and consolidating a more professional interest in lepidoptery, his beloved butterflies). The relentless creation of the staggering pieces of literature that Nabokov composed in his new language – Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada – has, through its appearance of ease, paradoxically tended to undermine some of this achievement. To forge a new literary identity within an entirely new cultural atmosphere, as well as obtain a new readership as an unknown immigrant author of obscure Russian poems, plays and novels, was an immense task.

The scandalous success of Lolita (1955) obviously helped: it provided not merely financial security and possibility – the chance to resign from teaching and return to a now peaceful Europe – but fuelled curiosity from the book-buying public into his previous literary life. Translations followed, and Nabokov’s bibliography began to expand from both ends: new English works were created, while the old Russian ones appeared in English for the first time.

At the centre of this risky but ultimately triumphant switch, Nabokov wrote his autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951; revised 1966). Mainly concerned with his idyllic Russian upbringing but also touching on the thrills and privations of his émigré life, it is a meticulous masterpiece of the genre and as much a work of art as any of his novels or stories. Nabokov’s massive (and tremendously entertaining) four-volume annotated edition (1964) of his homeland’s most celebrated poem – Pushkin’s seminal, foundational Eugene Onegin (1833) – also helped confirm the importance of Russian reinspections during this later period of his life.

This threefold process of literary rebirth, rediscovery and self-examination re-liberated Nabokov to conceive even more versions of his self, which he poured into his brilliant later work (Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins! and the unfinished Original of Laura), with their remarkable sardonic considerations of personality and biography. More comprehensively, translating his Russian works into English freed Nabokov to regulate his own legacy and balance the two halves of his career.

By revisiting both his own life and his earlier novels, Nabokov ensured an evenness and validity to his entire work: a consistent body of literary achievement, now in a uniform language, but full of enough subjects, references, jokes, shifts, hints and games that meant the Russian side to his life was not only not forgotten, but indispensable to a complete and proper understanding of his literary world. He had accomplished the impossible: he had united, not merely connected, the torn fragments of his life, sewing them together, if not seamlessly, then more exquisitely than any purer fabric. Indeed, these splits and tears in Nabokov’s life helped forge his themes and designs: his quest for symmetry, precision and parody; his understanding of fractured identity and wretched loss.

This book will address and explore some of the most persistent Nabokovian motifs – in particular exile, patterns, and the ‘otherworld’. The last of these is an imperfect translation of the Russian potustoronnost, the quality associated with the ‘beyond’, with the transcendent, uncertain border between life and death, existence and non-existence. The textures, plots and meanings of Nabokov’s work are immersed in this idea, yielding an optimism which bonds love and lucidity while offering understanding, reconciliation and possibility. He takes our experience of living in a complex, often frightening world without answers and fashions responses to this predicament.

Nabokov tended to reject traditional religion, especially its institutional aspects (and even the more accessible sacred imagery and poetics) to investigate space, time and eschatological questions in his own way, his hopes not clouded or burdened by conventional spiritual teachings or the bogus promises of salvation heralded by those claiming to be God’s representatives on earth. Yet scholarship’s inclination to exaggerate Nabokov’s disinterest in religion has often obscured or excluded important theological readings of his works, as well as crucial spiritual and philosophical concerns, which are linked to both his patterns and his principles.

In Nabokov, metaphysics is inseparable from ethics and aesthetics; indeed, as these essays show, these form a specific continuum of Nabokovian principles rather than three distinct categories, each mutually illuminating the others. This makes the aesthetic designs of his art (which have generally been seen as his defining trait) inescapably bound to his moral challenges and ambiguities as well as his otherworldly gestures and intuitions.

We see this in Nabokov’s plots and wider structures, as well as in detailed motifs he employs, such as recurring objects and entities: the flowers of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), the puddles in Bend Sinister (1947), and the squirrels of Pnin (1957). (The former two we will leave readers to discover for themselves; the latter, we will find, populate Pnin as sly rodent envoys from a possible hereafter and as subtle moral indicators.) Nabokov’s patterns embody, mirror and inform the hope for (rather than belief in) some form of transcendent, timeless, non-material existence – not one associated with a god or celestial figure, but rather a realm of being.

Patterns are beautiful, ordered, regular, predictable, but they also invite misgiving and scepticism. Is there something sinister in their perfection? Does their symmetry conceal something? Their very flawlessness invites chaos via its own destruction. Uniformity can turn monotonous, hypnotic, disturbing. Nabokov’s patterns – his signature structures, devices, characters, perspectives, alliteration, rhythm and syntax – encourage these qualms and questions, forcing us to interrogate and negotiate his meanings and the complex ethics involved.

This synthesis of concerns exists even (and especially) at the level of punctuation: Nabokov is, notoriously, the master of parentheses, a literary tool which patterns and plagues his texts. Each pair contains a confined explosion, linguistic and moral energy held in a trap of power and precision. Take the most famous: Lolita’s ‘(picnic, lightning)’, which Humbert uses to laconically inform the reader of the manner of his mother’s death. On only the novel’s second page (not including John Ray Jr’s crucial, hilarious false foreword), the rhythm, sonic mirroring, spectacular casualness and striking unconcern are together performing a range of interlocked ethical, aesthetic and metaphysical duties. They warn us to Humbert’s linguistic power and moral laxity, as well as to the way the dead can regain, if not their life, then their legitimacy, their integrity, their ultimate victory over their callous narrator (something Lolita herself will eventually claim by the novel’s close).

Nabokov’s parentheses form patterns across his work, their strength and economy a pure and distilled form of his comic but deadly serious art: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ is almost a perfect concentration of Lolita’s verbal exuberance and moral complexity in hyper-intense form. Parentheses are his style, sophistication, tomfoolery, difficulty and dexterity – as well as his ethical veracity – at its most refined.

For all the superb fun of Nabokov’s use of language and patterns, they are no mere superficial stunt: they are there to enrich the gravity and scope of his art. They are the conscious means to both enter and escape the vortex of his exquisite ethical tornadoes. Correspondingly, across Nabokov’s work, characters themselves often have an inkling of their own fictional existence, a textual self-consciousness that can guarantee their sanity (as well as take it away). Their self-awareness is no mere game either (though it is often a delight), but is an integral part of Nabokov’s moral and otherworldly patterns, as the author invites his characters to transcend the bonds of their fictive prisons.

Exile is a crucial theme in Nabokov, and not merely the forced or voluntary separation from one’s homeland, even if this is a persistent feature of his work, one understandable from a writer compelled to move on again and again in his life. Rather, exiles of all kinds proliferate. Characters within his tales, even parts of the novels themselves, are alienated from each other, isolated or divided. Identities and texts are split and expelled, displaced and destroyed, coerced into psychological camps, their right of return unclear. Nabokov’s muster of psychological and textual refugees seek shelter and representation in imagined jurisdictions of sanctuary. To enter these havens, some employ not so much false passports or forged visas as entirely illusory personalities, ones known not even to themselves but only to their creator, who is both the chuckling, cynical immigration officer and the benevolent embrace of the charitable committee.

Unlike Nabokov, or his heroes and heroines, we might not ourselves have suffered the adversity of political oppression or a perilously fragmented identity. But all of us experience anguish, anger, confusion, loss and loneliness, and Nabokov is there, in the tone and texture of his art: to explore, to empathize and to understand. Grief and isolation skulk and linger – dangerous, destructive – simultaneously eroding and enhancing confidence, waiting to terrorize, bewitch and bewilder. His works show how these states can persecute and manipulate us, playing mind games, deforming normality, blurring frames or perimeters.

Yet if boundaries in Nabokov – psychological, cultural, geographic, linguistic – are often zones of anxiety and trepidation, they are also precincts for anticipation and opportunity, to be traversed with amusement, even indulgence. We have seen the quiet optimism of the otherworld theme, but Nabokov also suffuses through his creations infinite intersections with past – and future – textual collaborators. Much of his art is an art of parody, automatically making him highly intertextual, dialoguing with other authors and their work. Though this is often to mock (Dostoevsky is a habitual target of Nabokov’s rapier wit), it is more frequently to rejoice in the pleasure of connection and the charm of discovery, as well as the elucidation of meaning such interactions can promote.

Pushkin and Shakespeare, for Nabokov the respective forefathers of the two languages in which he wrote, permeate his texts. Sometimes they do so quite straightforwardly: Hermann’s dark Pushkin perversions in Despair (1934) are overt, as this pathological narcissist seeks to flaunt his familiarity with the Russian poet. Significant parts of The Gift (1938) directly engage with and develop Pushkin’s achievements. Typically, however, these connections are subtler, a little sly, and often combine directness with evasion, such as the way Kinbote both observes and overlooks the networks of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in Pale Fire (1962). Timid or unversed readers need not be put off by such intertextual games. They are part of the stuff and substance of Nabokov’s writing, an aspect of its fun, but failing to grasp them (which no one can hope to do all the time) does not hinder enjoyment of the works’ pleasures.

These references, taken along with Nabokov’s scientist’s eye for observation and minutiae, as well as his conjuror’s knack for tricks and surprises, are all accomplished aspects of his painstaking attention to detail. At the other extreme, but closely connected with these features, is his craft, the art of his compositional administration, the delight and dexterity of his organization. Here, long-term plot lines meet and join local features, producing his intricacy of patterns and cross-connections amid uncompromising multidimensional labyrinths.

Correspondingly, this book strives to portray all Nabokov’s works as a box set of highly individual but interrelated works that tackle similar themes in diverse ways, restless and dynamic, exploring and re-exploring. Because of their incessant (and often very necessary) rereadability, as well as the interconnection between the works themselves, Nabokov’s novels and stories are an endless source of intellectual, sensual and emotional activity, taking us to sights, people and places we never imagined.

Yet Nabokov can, too often, seem the sneering, mocking magician, full of portentousness and conceit, so sure in his genius that he can get away with almost anything. Certainly he is mischievous, scandalous, dangerous. But he is also genial, jolly and just. He cares about us both as readers and human beings, attendant travellers in literature and fellow sufferers in life.

Nabokov is like an ideal walking companion. He has excellent stories to tell, is almost absurdly well read and well informed, but he understands, too, how to listen: he is empathetic, serious, concerned. Occasionally a little crotchety and fastidious – he insists on the best boots and the finest wet-weather gear – he is also tolerant and carefree, methodically planning the day but happy to wander or get slightly lost as part of the fun. In sun or squall he is energetic, scrambling on bluffs and peaks but delighted to slow down and pause, reflect on a bench, admire a view.

From time to time, he’ll surprise you with a hidden bar of chocolate or tot of whisky, make you roar with his impression of a mutual friend, or gasp through a conjuring sleight of hand. He is generous, convivial and kind: he knows the best places to eat and sleep (‘just a little further, over that hill’) and is quite likely to offer to pay for the wine. But he’ll have you up at six, for there are butterflies to catch, marvels to behold, on the outrageous adventure of his art.

Exile

The Life of Vladimir Nabokov

… to sigh for somber Russia,

where I suffered, where I loved,

where I buried my heart.

– Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

(trans. Vladimir Nabokov)

Russia

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was born into an